


Initiative

by IVYLYRE



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - High School, Drinking, Drinking Games, F/F, F/M, M/M, More tags to be added, Pranks, Screw authority, Secret Society, Teen!Avengers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 12:31:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11313453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IVYLYRE/pseuds/IVYLYRE
Summary: "I'm bored"How many times have you said those two words?How many times have you done something about it?Basically this is a Boarding School Avengers AU where they form a secret society and proceed to raise hell. That I started last year...and never updated again.Hm...I'm having another crack at this (famous last words)But here's the catch, I figure the only way I'll actually update this is if I don't spend 5000000000000000 hours overanalysing every word...SOI'm not going to edit anything until there's a chunk upSo I hope it's readable...but tell me if it's not yea?Good luck to meGood luck to youGoodbyeXD





	Initiative

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to my shitshow! 
> 
> I can never predict where exactly my writing will go- I've got a vague outline of the plot but beyond that...
> 
> Therefore I'll be adding tags as and when I discover in going to cover them. 
> 
> Anyhoo you're here now...please...sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

Tony beat his alarm clock, waking up just in time to grab it and flip the switch on the back that would prevent it from leaping off his desk and proceeding to run around the room, rattling off last night’s shipping forecast at far too many decibels for six o’clock on a Saturday morning. As it was, the digital display changed to 06:00 without ceremony and the eardrums of every living organism within a five mile radius thanked him.

The last time he’d slept in and allowed his clock to go off, he had to spend a good five minutes with his fingers stuffed in his ears, unsuccessfully attempting to coax it down from the chandelier where it had somehow managed to perch, until he gave up and went to go find something with a bit of a kick behind it to shoot the thrice damned machine down. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy it, it irritated him sure, but the odd thing had gained a fair amount of sentimental value. He’d made it when he was seven to annoy his au pair after she tried to force him to go to bed at a reasonable hour (really, who did she think he was? Someone with enough time to waste large chunks of it sleeping?). 

It was one of those spur of the moment creations really; his own temper tantrums proved insufficient in dissuading her from her foolish idea that he, Tony Stark, had a bedtime. So what did he do? He upped the ante.

About fifty times.

And so his alarm clock was born. 

It chased the unfortunate au pair around the house and grounds for a good couple of hours before she came to the realisation that no sum of money would be valid compensation for dealing with this on a nightly basis and packed her bags.  
Tony was proud to say his creation even chased her a mile down the driveway, during which she passed Tony’s parents who were returning home from some charity gala or something, and paused briefly to scream obscenities at the tinted car window about their son in a delightful mixture of Russian and English, before continuing down the driveway at full tilt.

That evening was the first and only time that, for one short moment, Howard Stark looked at his son with anything other than disdain. 

The next moment he decided to send him away.

And so began the grand tour of the country’s most lucrative boarding schools.

He’d always hated his family’s estate. Completely isolated from the modern world, it looked like something straight out of a history book. In fact, it had only taken a brief search for him to find it in a history book (Page 62, The History of Britain). The smooth, dull grey stone of the parapets sucked both colour and warmth from the surroundings, giving off a…cheerful atmosphere. Built on top of a slowly eroding cliff one hundred and fifty feet above the North Sea, its appeal was only enhanced by the constant sheet rain, fog and storms. Not that it mattered- by Tony’s calculations, it would only take 15 years for the cliffs to erode so badly the entire east wing of the castle would be sent plunging to the bottom of the deep blue sea. 

He hoped anyway.

The frigid nature of the surroundings was matched by the attitudes of the people inside- one in particular. After Maria Stark’s death, Howard became even more distant than before, taking extended work trips every time he knew Tony would be returning home and shutting himself away in his study for the brief time they were inhabiting the same space. 

Tony rolled out of bed, getting to his feet in one fluid movement. Stretching his arms about his head, he surveyed the couple of bags he had to take down with him. Today was the day. Tony laughed at his own overdramatised thoughts.  


He was used to new schools -he tended to get expelled every couple of months- so he had a lot of practice being ‘the new kid’. Heck, he started at new schools more frequently than he brushed his hair, this one was nothing special.  
Except some niggling corner of his mind told him it was. This time it would be different, it told him. This time he wouldn’t be barging in, disturbing the pre-existing social structure, or even be subjected to the calculating stares of those trying to work out whether ‘the new kid’ was worth talking to. No. This time everyone was new- nobody knew anybody and the social pecking order would still be unestablished.  
He knew exactly what was going to happen.

Some would take the chance to completely reinvent themselves, scrabbling for a chance to be popular, hiding the interests and opinions that got them bullied even within the mild microclimate of their prep schools. Feigned disinterest and purposely failed setting tests would secure them a spot amid the masses where they could utilise this relative anonymity to find the ‘right’ sort of friends- friends who had a high chance of being popular. A few weeks down the line, they’d secure their spot somewhere on the popularity ladder, which, despite their best efforts, was nowhere near as high as they hoped to be and very much set in stone.  
Others would simply continue with the bland façade that over the years had drained away every scrap of personality they may once have owned. They would target the easily manipulated (see above), building up a hoard of followers who would do anything for them. Then they would ‘rebel’- picking the dullest rules to break -smoking, drinking, bullying- and when they were inevitably caught, would throw these followers under the bus, one by one. Sooner or later, people would wake up, and this ruse of faux popularity would fade and die.

Then there were those that would hide, and those that would thrive- the two minority groups. These two groups, despite seeming polar opposites, were generally made up of similar sorts of people with one dividing factor- confidence. Both groups were unashamedly themselves, warts and all. Both groups formed real relationships with those around them, interacting with who they wanted to, when they wanted to. However, one group was shunned for this, the other was applauded- put up on the shining pedestal of popularity. The brute force confidence carried by those at the top made it difficult to ignore them, and even harder to oppose them.  
Moving schools so frequently gave Tony the chance to observe and experience this microcosm of society from every point of view. He’d moved past hiding, past just trying to fit in, experienced both the top and the bottom of the ladder. He’d made friends, sure, but he’d never found a group of friends he felt he could truly open up to. He had, however, discovered the golden rule of school- false bravado will get you everywhere as long as you have the brains and the balls to pull it off.

Tony liked to think he had plenty of both.

His send off to a new school was always the same- always the same stern warning that this was his ‘last chance’ and that it ‘better work out, otherwise you won’t be a member of this family any longer’. He knew better than to believe his father, after all, he’d already reached the limit of his legal powers over Tony every time he decided to pack him off to boarding school. Sooner or later, Tony would get bored enough to call his bluff. From there? Well he had options, so many options. Each scheme had to be grander than the last- skunk spray in the air fresheners and cress drawings on football pitches soon became dissembled vehicles and indoor fireworks displays. It was the latter that had ended his time at the most recent school- he’d decided he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, both figuratively and literally. It had been surprisingly easy to buy and steal the components needed to make the fireworks without raising suspicion. He then placed them around the main school building, used the schools own power cabling to cause sparks to set them all off at once, and sat back to enjoy the show. 

He didn’t even try to deny the fact it was his handiwork- there was no point- everyone knew he was the only person who could pull something like that off. He was bored. Bored of going to a new school, hoping to find a partner in crime (in some instances, literally), only to find that no one there possessed any brain cells whatsoever. You could be excused for thinking that spending his time bouncing between schools would mean Tony had a large group of friends spread thinly across the British Isles and beyond as well as a girl in every port. The second one was true enough but the first…It wasn’t that Tony was particularly antisocial, he just had no interest in staying in contact with the sorts of people he met there. Last year he’d come close to finding a real friend, a girl named Pepper whose bright wit was only rivalled by the brightness of her hair, only to be stabbed in the back almost instantly.

It hadn’t ended well. 

But his highly logical brain was still convinced that this time would be better, that the last six years were simply part of a now closed chapter.  
There was no logical reason for him to believe this time would be any better. The school was no different- another posh boarding school whose old buildings equipped with state of the art tech were a holding place for upper class teenagers before they could go spend a few years traipsing around Thailand on their ‘gap yah’ before using their trust funds to buy a penthouse flat somewhere in London, a short commute away from Daddy’s company, where they would work for the rest of their lives.  
It was never a good sign when the most impressive names on the alumni list were those who had been expelled.

Yet he was determined that this time would be different, this school was the one. This time he would use the blank slate identity to his advantage, this would be his true reset, his second chance. 

Tony didn’t kid himself that he would remain unrecognised- his many dramatic expulsions had made him infamous among the upper and middle class families whose junior members would be his classmates. 

Still- he’d started as he meant to go on- he was going in completely blind. Usually he would hack into the school system a couple of days before he started, pulling up the records of everyone in his year, memorising names, faces, grades and interests without even realising, cataloguing his peers. He’d barely refrained from doing such this year but the allure of a completely fresh start won him over. As it was, the only information he had was the few details the school had emailed to him- the names, pictures and contact details of the eleven other boys he’d be sharing a room with in Morley (his new boarding house) for potentially an entire year. He was also given the names and pictures of the 54 older boys he’d be sharing a house with. These he had committed to memory, yet he was still prepared to pretend not to know people’s names right until the point (sooner or later, one way or another) he left the school.

One of these new peers had created a WhatsApp group chat which had been eloquently named ‘Morley 2K14’ to which Tony’s only contribution had been to interrupt the stale banter with a link to a video of the lawnmower he had made fly a couple of schools ago. For all they knew, it was just a funny video he had found on YouTube that had spawned a couple of memes. Whatever they thought, it effectively broke the ice, and he’d muted the chat before going back to lazily rewiring the electronic gear box of his dad’s Range Rover in reverse. 

A skim read through the thousands of messages they’d exchanged without him a couple of weeks later had told him all he needed to know- they were alright. A few seemed to be seriously lacking in the brains department, but no one that would cause him serious trouble- they were simply your typical upper/middle class ‘lads’ with stories of antics while on tour or shooting grouse. They were the sort of people who would size you up the instant you walked into a room then shrug and place you in one of two groups- friend, or weirdo to be ridiculed every single day under the guise of friendship.

There was one kid, Bruce, that caught his attention. He hadn’t said a single word in the group chat, despite having opened the messages (at least as far as Tony could tell). On the surface, it simply appeared as though he was shy; a hypothesis backed by his lack of any social media presence whatsoever and by the photo in the pack, which showed a rather pale boy with dark hair, hiding behind his slightly-too-long fringe and thick glasses. However, even the shyest teenage boy says something first time he talks to his peers, particularly if its only over the internet, usually to give the impression that he isn’t shy. Viewing the chat but not talking made Bruce intriguing -he appeared to be like Tony- one of those rare people who didn’t care enough what others thought about him to feign interest in their conversations.  
Today was the day though. The day Tony had had 10 long weeks to think about. His fabled ‘fresh start’ was finally upon him. It wasn’t that he was going to stick to the rules this time, try to leave his admittedly bad reputation behind him. Pff, that was boring. No. This time he planned to find at least one person -hopefully more- who were like him. A group of people that he could trust to come up with hare-brained schemes as incredible as his own and to join him in following through with them. 

He’d stick around if that happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Time on Initiative: The first evening...


End file.
